One of the first items dumped from the Spicer commission's list of 14 questions for Canadians to ponder was what they thought of the division of powers. The citizens, it seems, hadn't a clue. Can't say I blame them: neither do their leaders. The prime minister has a team of deputy ministers working on it this very moment. But perhaps it would help if we asked a different question.

If we are to think clearly about the role and disposition of state power, we must avoid expressing as quantities what are essentially qualitative questions. How much government taxes, for example, is not nearly so important as how it taxes: A high tax rate, uniformly applied, is less damaging to the economy than a low tax rate with all sorts of exceptions.

So it is with federalism. Throughout our history, we have been consumed with the question of which areas of jurisdiction should pertain to which level of government, federal or provincial - that is, with how much power each should exercise. But surely the more relevant question is how each exercises its power. Rather than dividing power according to broad and discrete categories - justice, education, transport - we might make the division in the particular aspects of power assigned to each.

There is, after all, no immutable principle of statecraft that decrees health is a provincial thing, while communications is federal. Montesquieu is silent on the matter, as is Burke. In particular, the often-voiced opinion that the provinces are better able to administer programs because they are ''closer'' to the public they serve is pure assertion.

The true statement is not that the provinces are better at providing services than the feds, but that some provinces are better at it than others. The chief contribution of decentralized authority in a federal system, in other words, is not competence, but competition. The provinces serve as the laboratories of federalism, testing rival policy models against each other. But if that is true, then it applies across all, or almost all, areas of jurisdiction.

Where the provinces afford diversity, where diversity is useful, the role of the federal government is to assure uniformity, where uniformity is to be desired. Where the nation wishes to project its influence beyond its borders - trade, foreign policy, defence - this is so essential as to preclude all but the most trivial provincial involvement. But in most other areas of jurisdiction, such a role sits easily alongside that of the provinces.

What I am proposing might be called, to borrow some of the current jargon, massive concurrency. The federal government and the provinces would be placed in relation to one another rather like the U.S. president and the Congress. Each would have certain powers to propose, subject to the other's corresponding powers to dispose, in a broad range of policy fields.

Thus, Ottawa could propose a new spending program, complete with certain general principles that would underly its application across Canada. But it could not spend money on it - that would be the prerogative of the provinces, with perhaps seven provinces with 50% of the population needed for launch. They could design their programs as they saw fit, spend as much or as little as they liked, provided they met the basic federal guidelines.

In practical effect, this would not be greatly different from current arrangements regarding, say, medicare. The difference is that national standards would be enforced by law, rather than bribery - checks and balances, not cheques and balances. When money was plentiful, Ottawa could spend its way into areas of provincial jurisdiction. It can't do that any more, so it will need a legal mandate: concurrent jurisdiction across the board.

Provinces, on the other hand, could propose legislation in almost any field - subject, again, to certain specific constraints enforced by Ottawa. These would be three: provincial laws and practices could not distort the free flow of trade and investment between provinces (or more radically, within the provinces); they could not have extraprovincial consequences for the environment; and they could not violate the Charter of Rights. This might be hard for the provinces to swallow, especially Quebec. The tradeoff is that provinces would be able to greatly expand their jurisdiction.

I realize this goes against the current vogue for ''disentanglement,'' whether through massive decentralization, as the Allaire report suggests, or centralization, as many in Canada would prefer. But if what we desire is good government, rather than what's good for government, then entanglement is what we need. The more governments are entangled with each other, the less they will be entangled with us.